CX Customer Concepts—Customer Service Complaints

Here’s some great news for Customer Service leaders: there’s a new app available, which takes complaints from your customers… and follows them up. Aggressively. It uses social media and other channels to make sure complaints are registered with the company accountable, and even helps with conflict resolution. You’re always going to know now when your customers have got something to say.

If you don’t acknowledge the complaint for more than two weeks, it gets moved to a marketplace where it can be purchased by another business. And you thought social made it easy to complain!

Now, fair’s fair: two weeks is a long time to wait for a response – if you’re taking that long to respond to customers, you might be in a spot of trouble anyway.

However, there now exists an app that seeks to amplify the voice of your most unimpressed customers. So, you better make sure you respond.

It’s easy to see why consumers would want to use the service, if they have a real grievance; they will want to take every opportunity to get you to listen, and the influence of their social channels alone may not be enough. This app scales up their complaint, takes the hassle out of it for them, and gets a resolution on their behalf.

But why would a business want to buy the complainer’s custom? Why is there a need for an app like this in the first place? There isn’t. As long as you effectively combat complaints and respond to feedback through your own channels.

You have so many platforms available to monitor and manage customer feedback – the key is to operationalise them effectively. Taking feedback from the jaws of social and back offline, by proactively monitoring and responding, should mean that there aren’t any customers slipping through the net and airing their grievances elsewhere.

Once issues have been identified and the customer contacted – they are usually receptive to being brought offline for a more in depth conversation and resolution than can be offered by the likes of Twitter.

But it’s a customer’s world, and it’s essential that your feedback channels are responsive and easy to navigate. It also wouldn’t hurt to offer customers some real benefits to bring them back to your terms.

Encourage. With apps out there now working against you to make it easy for customers to upscale complaints, you need to offer an easier alternative. That means a cleaner, user-friendly interface, across all your channels. You must build in common queries and intuitive navigation. Make that “Contact Us” button obvious, and set out clear SLAs so that users know exactly what to expect.

Reward. Here’s where you need to offer a real user benefit. Think about points systems to build loyalty. Can you give loyalty points as an incentive for feedback? How about when a customer is in store, can you reward check-ins?

Implement. Now that you have logged their experience within your own channel, you can make sure they don’t have the same reason to complain again. Your CSRs will have a record of the customer’s full service history, in your native environment, and they can use this to inform interactions going forward.

Implement. Now that you have logged their experience within your own channel, you can make sure they don’t have the same reason to complain again. Your CSRs will have a record of the customer’s full service history, in your native environment, and they can use this to inform interactions going forward.

Customers are already getting in touch through social channels – and you should monitor and respond to these where appropriate. Building service into your brand at every level is essential, and provides opportunities to get your customers back on your territory. Make it easier for customers to come to you through your own channels, and embrace their feedback to make real changes. Analyse data and apply historic interactions and behaviors to make real-time business decisions based on what you are learning.